Today's electronic information landscape is growing exponentially with no signs of slowing. This poses a significant challenge for academic libraries. Librarians must continually learn and adapt to harness this explosion of resources. To fulfill their claim as the leaders in the information field they must be effective in providing access and…

The New Media Consortium's "Horizon Report" for higher education cites games and gamification with a time-to-adoption of two to three years. The use of digital games is almost ubiquitous in social media and is swiftly gaining popularity in other industries as well. Many in higher education have embraced gamification due to its…

With the growing population of undergraduate students on our campus and an increased focus on their success, librarians at a large midwestern university were interested in the citation management styles of this university cohort. Our university library spends considerable resources each year to maintain and promote access to the robust…

Foreign language films generate language acquisition, international cultural films help with global business interactions, medical videos teach students new medical procedures, and movies based on books encourage reading. Films can be instructional as well as FUN! Yet some of these cinematic materials receive little to no attention, not to mention…

In their Top Trends of 2012, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) named data curation as one of the issues to watch in academic libraries in the near future (ACRL, 2012, p. 312). Data curation can be summarized as "the active and ongoing management of data through its life cycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship,…

While recreational reading material was once an integral part of the academic library collection and librarians were seen as guides in reading development for students, this has not been the case in the last 50 years. Fiscal constraints have forced library professionals to make choices so that leisure reading material has not been viewed as a high…

While libraries offer next generation public services such as mobile access and e-books, these services are often neither home-grown nor sustainable. Libraries have a history of lending and services built on a simple model: they purchase an item and then provide it to the community. Unfortunately, the latest generation of services offered by…

Wise and careful selection of materials remains among the most important and enduring duties of the librarian--and also among the most difficult. The author has found this to be especially true in a specialized-subject library, where traditional collection development methods do not always yield good results. While collection development practices…

The Future Voices in Public Services column is a forum for students in graduate library and information science programs to discuss key issues they see in academic library public services, to envision what they feel librarians in public service have to offer to academia, to tell us of their visions for the profession, or to tell us of research…

Offering a separate, popular reading collection can be a valuable public service in academic libraries. Popular reading is also known as leisure reading, recreational reading, and reading for pleasure. These phrases are synonyms for an interest in reading bestsellers, mysteries, romance novels, biographies, graphic novels, humor, self-help, or…

The article relates how the Brooklyn Campus Library of Long Island University, despite limitations of physical distance and the varying conditions of the remote graduate campus at Westchester, makes every effort to face each challenge creatively with practical solutions for implementation. We share our findings and experiences--what worked and…

This article explores the influence of the rare book and manuscript repository on graduate student researchers in the humanities, through an examination of the graduate research fellowship program. Based on a comparison of residential research fellowship programs at twenty-three rare book and manuscript repositories, this article argues that…

For the past several years, many in the library profession have questioned the relevance of reference librarians in the digital age. With so much information available online, are reference librarians even still needed? The author believes they are--probably even more so today than ever. It is precisely the vast proliferation of electronic…

Beginning in July 2002, the Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill underwent an 11 million dollar renovation. During three phases of the renovation, parts of the collection were inaccessible to patrons. In order to continue to make the library's collection available, library staff created a paging system.…